The present invention relates to management of electronic forms. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for building forms and collecting data.
Along with the developments in the Internet and cloud technologies, electronic forms are becoming more and more popular. The use of electronic forms can accelerate internal approval workflow and enhance the overall corporate efficiency, thereby eliminating the low efficiency problem found in traditional approval processes. Therefore, many companies now use electronic forms for internal procedures.
Along with the diversity and complexity of the forms used by companies, when an existing electronic form does not meet corporate needs and new form specifications are needed, it is common to have a system engineer or programmer modify the program for that form or build a new form and then upload the modified or new electronic form to the form system for use by users. This practice is time-consuming and impacts the efficiency in processing forms. This is especially true if multiple new forms have to be built at the same time, or if the fields and layouts of multiple existing forms have to be modified. This is because a considerable amount of time is required to complete the programming work, thereby adversely affecting the efficiency in updating electronic forms.
Programming is currently a common way to create electronic forms, and this has to be done by professional programmers. Moreover, it requires a lot of training costs and form management time.
If a customized mechanism can be provided to allow administrators to use familiar word processing application software to build a desired form and then set the approval workflow via the form system and finalize the electronic form, then the system engineer or programmer will not have to modify the form, thus considerably reducing the time for form management.
Therefore, how to reduce the time required for managing forms has become a very important issue for software developers.